Statistically interior room paining the most common DIY projects that people take on but is also the most common one that gets stuffed up. Creating a mess while doing interior painting requires almost no effort at all as bits of paint begin to splatter, drip, sag and stain where they shouldn’t be.
The alternative might be to just throw in the towel and hire a professional painter to take care of it, but we know you aren’t a quitter. Follow the tips outline in this article and you’ll find it much easier to control the amount of mess your interior painting causes.
Let’s take a look at how to paint interiors without creating a mess.
Preparation
Before you begin whipping out the brushes and going to town, follow these preparation steps:
- Clean out the entire room as much as possible. The fewer items like furniture or accessories cluttering the room will means more space to work and less chance of getting paint on something.
- Take off the cover plates on your electrical outlets and switches. Set them aside in a safe place or take the opportunity to replace them with better ones.
- Protect the lighting fixtures on the ceiling and the wall with tape or just remove them.
- If you are painting a door, remove the doorknob and the strike plate for the latch.
- Use drop cloths to protect big furniture pieces.
- Keep the floor protected with drop cloths or plastic sheets.
- If you are sanding, finish the job then remove all dust that remains in one go
- Make sure all dry spaces to be painted are clean
- Make sure you have good lighting in the room so you can see precisely what you’re doing.
Whether or not you use painters’ tape to cordon off wooden baseboards depends on your own manual dexterity as a painter. If you don’t think you can control brush strokes very well then use the painters’ tape.
Painting order
There is a particular order in which things should be painted to produce optimal results. All professionals will tell you the best thing to do is start from the ceiling and work downwards.
- When applying primer, coat the ceiling before the trim and walls.
- Begin painting the ceiling.
- Begin painting the walls, use a roller and then cut-in around woodwork and baseboards.
- Paint the trim of the baseboard.
- Paint the door and window trim.
- If painting doors and windows, its best to remove them if you can and do them while they are laying down.
